Very exciting to find actual evidence though. Organic implements almost never ever survive.
Of course ancient humans also had a sense of beauty, but I guess I tend to assume they were much rougher with their construction. I wonder what they were trying not to scuff.
Other options: you don't have metal really. You could grind stuff, maybe, but that's a _lot_ of effort.
So soft faced hammers should have had a place just by virtue of lack of other good options. My understanding is that for several things it'd be a lot of effort but relatively low technique required and relatively low risk of just cracking/smashing whatever you're trying to work on into uselessness.
Even today there aren't many uses for metal (excluding brass) hammers apart from driving nails, stone (carving) chisels and everything involving deforming metal. For everything else you can use a "soft" hammer or mallet.
Yes, but that still includes tools like woodworking and wood carving chisels, froes, axes, metal splitting wedges (to protect against metal splinters flying around),...
Doesn't seem mentioned in the text or comments. This short video blew my mind: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/T4Couxopo2w
The small brother of a string is a threat
Almost every building today (most of them are small house-like structures) is made of wood, and it has been that way for recorded history. Wood shows up in many places where you would expect humans to have come up with a more advanced material today, too.
In that way, classifying a "wood age" is not all that useful.
Metals get outsized attention I think because we use them to kill each other, so switching to a new metal is quite dramatic.
Scandanaivans use a particularly large amount of wood, even in their city centers and even for skyscrapers.
In northern Europe the building style is entirely different and most houses still have a wooden frame.
Citation? It doesn't stand to reason given that most people live and work in cities, not in rural areas, especially in Europe [1].
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.RUR.TOTL.ZS?location...
Even in the UK we describe our normal building habit as "sticks n bricks" and there are a lot of sticks. Under my feet, right now, there are wooden joists and a plywood subfloor. I live on a hill. Some ground floor (first floor) rooms have solid conc. sub floors but the other half has the usual (1930s) two foot cavity, involving brick piers on conc raft and wooden joists to slap the floor across.
We still have a large stock of wattle and daub cottages with thatched roof too.
Every other country in Europe I have ever visited has rather a lot of wooden buildings in it too. I lived in West Germany for some years, for example.
Sticks and bricks lends itself to an environment with plenty of mud and fewer trees. It is quite brittle so no earthquakes thank you. The UK's largest recent earthquake was basically a knee trembler.
Of course this is somewhat region dependent, and wood is definitely making a comeback again
I have never heard the phrase 'sticks n bricks'. That is technical parlance. Nobody in the history of Eastenders has used that phrase.
It is true that there are wattle and daub houses but it is the one thatched roof cottage that you notice next to the busy A road, not the thousands of semis in the neighbouring estates.
In Glasgow there are large parts of the city where only some doors are made of wood. Everything else is concrete, steel, plastic and glass. These are 'closes' (apartments) which is different to the English 'close' (street). I am not sure wood would work for 'closes'.
London has a lot of wood, but so much of London might as well be from Orwell's 'Down and Out in Paris and London'. Landlords do not spend money so those sash windows and wooden floors are there for an eternity. West Germany has far better housing stock with details such as windows that close.
In other places the roof structure is often made of wood. And although technically it's not part of the building, concrete forms used for foundation/walls are mostly made of OSB/plywood.
You can see this in the tradition of constructing fences as well, if there is a lot of wood people use lots of it. In the south near Denmark the tradition is to use as little as possible.
[1] https://www.scb.se/hitta-statistik/sverige-i-siffror/mannisk...
Reinforced concrete is almost two hundred years old by now [0]. How many people live in homes built over one hundred years ago? Not only have many of those old homes been replaced, but the population is much larger now.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforced_concrete#History
Many people in Europe's historical city centres.
vaults, domes, and flying buttresses extend the arch principle to enclose large spaces. there are domes still standing made from unreinforced concrete that are 2000 years old
I would guess the person you’re responding to doesn’t mean the hidden bits, as I’ve spent time in Spain and definitely come across wood in new buildings.
A potential reason for less obvious wood, Spain has less requirement for insulation than the UK and would benefit from slimmer walled, brick/concrete houses with no wooden partitions holding insulation for cooler temperatures during their peak heat.
i don't know what the situation is on other continents but i've sure seen a lot of photos and videos of concrete and brick buildings
The few exceptions are in the densest cities in the US, like New York, where new construction is concrete and steel.
Canada, I am sure, is the same. Mexico and South America, not so sure. I have been around some places in Central America that have tons of wood construction, and so did the parts of Argentina and Brazil I have seen, but you may have better information. Many houses that you think are concrete or brick actually have a wood frame.
remember there's a billion people living in america. only a third of those are in the usa, and the people in the usa are much more urbanized, meaning less buildings per person. canada is another 4% of the total american population. so roughly three quarters of the buildings in america are outside the usa and canada
there's also a coincidental factor, though; wood is cheap where forests are abundant, and although having abundant natural resources such as arable land and wood doesn't guarantee wealth, exhausting your natural resources through deforestation and desertification virtually guarantees poverty.
as for 'cheaper', well, the numerator is dollars, but what's the denominator? i would say it's 'house', but neither concrete nor wood is sold by the house; cement and sand and gravel and rebar are sold by the kilo, and wood is sold by the square meter. so we need some way to make them comparable
one approach is to try to compute 'cost per strength', on the theory that a house's worth of materials is enough materials to be strong enough to work as a house. but there are two different kinds of strength involved here. floors and roofs must resist flexure without breaking, and materialswise, that mostly depends on the material's tensile strength. they also must resist impact loadings, which depends on tensile strength but also flexibility: a more flexible floor can elastically absorb a greater impact energy before reaching the same tensile strain, and a tougher material is one that has a higher elastic energy capacity in this sense. walls, on the other hand, mostly must resist compression from above, and typically this mostly depends on their ability to resist buckling, not their material compressive strength. resisting buckling depends on not strength but stiffness: the material of the buckling beam must not bend far enough that the beam's effective compressive stiffness starts to decrease, causing it to bend further
a lot of people confuse strength and stiffness; i recommend watching the first demo in dan gelbart's https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtxA20Q-Uss, although for most of us it took a lot more than that to get enlightened
reinforced concrete (either pretensioned or in compression) gets its stiffness from sand and gravel, which are cheap as dirt (most of the cost of sand is the truck that delivers it to your building site) and its tensile strength from steel. i think the answer is that steel is in fact very much cheaper than wood per unit of either tensile strength or toughness
on the other hand, people usually build concrete walls to be much, much stiffer than wood-framed walls, so it's common for a given area of wood-framed wall to cost less than the same area of concrete wall. to compensate for this, people very commonly build the floors and frame of a building with reinforced concrete, then fill in the walls with cheap hollow brick. this is i think cheaper than a similarly non-load-bearing wood-frame wall made out of 2×4s and drywall, but not by that much
on the gripping hand, galvanized steel studs are cheaper than wooden 2×4s, and they're starting to become popular for low-cost construction, covered with drywall or cementboard
basically there's a lot of cluelessness going around in this thread by people who've apparently never thought about things like where amerigo vespucci sailed to, what columbus is said to have discovered (by landing where), where the members of the organization of american states are located, where the pan-american highway goes, etc.
https://www.amazon.com/Age-Wood-Material-Construction-Civili...
It is about how wood is arguably the most important material in human history. Covers a lot of its useful material properties, and makes very compelling arguments for how wood was instrumental in each era of human development.
Later, the modern humans used frequently arrow points made of stone.
It turns out that having 'true intelligence' probably doesn't matter if the tribe from the next valley over has bronze weapons and armour and would quite like to steal your stuff and enslave your people.
Is dying of drought, while being survived by less thirsty mutants, really solving any problems?
I guess there's some genetic lineage that keeps on replicating. Then we humans decide whether it's similar enough to keep labelling it the same "species". If so, maybe we declare that the species solved the problem of the drought.
Meanwhile, I doubt there were any creatures happy to die of thirst for lack of an aqueduct.
If we ignore that unfortunate reality and measure success by DNA replication, then civilization might still being doing alright. We've had a bit of a population explosion in the last few hundred years.
Calling evolution a solution is mostly hindsight.
And it’s not just the sheer number of varieties, but also how incredibly accessible and nutrient rich that they are. It always feels to me like magic that I can eat entire meals for weeks at a time just off the land in the northeast during the spring, summer & fall seasons. It feels like someone tweaked things to grow these kinds of plants specifically for easy human consumption.
Then again, could be I’m just overthinking. :o)
By being edible, tasty and nutritious, the likelihood of an animal eating the fruit and spreading the seeds is increased, and so both the animal and the plant wins.
We don't dump our crops in bogs, nor bones of cattle. In fact we plough the crop remains into the dirt for the health of the soil, and we grind up the bones of food animals for feed and other uses.
All of our buildings and works would disappear pretty fast, and a simple ice age scours the earth very effectively.
13k years is maybe not enough without an ice age, but in 50k years? No trace, except they'd think a meteor struck and caused a mass extinction event.
(I'm not even sure our last 200 years, where we really expanded, would even be a blip in fossil records)
We've found 0.4 million year old wooden javelins in peat bogs. Beyond that, we have intact dinosaur nests with eggs, 100 million years old, and these were not ground down to powder by glaciers. If there were any non-stone-age civilizations older than 10,000 years, their residue would be visible.
I know a load of human remains and accouterments were found in bogs.
Regards to the glaciers, I suppose there are ranges of effects. The Canadian Shield had all topsoil shorn away, in most places even now it's just a few feet of soil then granite.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Shield#Ecologyq
In such areas, nothing survived. Shell middens would be wiped away.
I may have over stated, but my point was it won't be as easy as some think.
We're not talking about people living in mud huts who only eat fruit, haven't discovered fire, and leave no archeological traces; likewise we're not talking about hyperintelligent dolphins who went extinct, or aliens that landed briefly 4 billion years ago on a continent that got subducted. If you want to talk about the non-discoverability of something that isn't an advanced civilization, go ahead, split that hair.
The next ice age we have is not going to remove any of Canada's open pit mines. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open-pit_mines
Children of a future civilization might not find out anything about our culture or language, but they are definitely going to know that we loved oysters. Meanwhile, their scientists will argue about what kind of iron-rich oysters are responsible for the remains of reinforced concrete along our prehistoric shores and rivers.
On that note, I once met someone who claimed to have found a piece of carved glass in the bushland peripheral to the city which would have dated from the period of initial contact between Europeans and aboriginals. He told me where it was found, in general terms, which is extremely inaccessible and thus it's still probably there - waiting for a rediscovery.
Further on that note, the main difference between hand grinding and initial machine grinding is a reliable rotary axis which generates a degree of symmetry and precision in the workpiece (due to the rotation about a fixed axis) not otherwise available to hand made tools. This is the general basis of all machining, ie. the use of a relatively precision ground reference plane or relative precision reference geometry to achieve precision work. Perhaps it can be said that it was the transition of an energy source to precise rotary motion (such as is used on pottery wheels and presumably very early lathes and grinding equipment) which sparked the industrial revolution and the modern era.
Amazing that the aboriginals of Australia had ~45,000 years (or ~1000 generations) of relatively stable presence but apparently never decided to invest in fixed machines for precision work. I guess this was because there is no evidence they ever had a wheel, which is a prerequisite, though anthropologically one might safely assume they frequently used round shape seedpods, stones or other naturally occurring elements to meet specific technical needs thus perhaps had no need to fashion artificially round elements. One may further suppose their seasonal lifestyles probably emphasised portability and reworkability in technological techniques over precision which probably offered very little in the way of benefit when you were, for example, spearing prey at relatively close range. After all, who wants to carry a machine hundreds of kilometers? Much better to build a new tool when you arrive.
Finally, I have a small ethnographic art collection focused on the Pacific. One of my better pieces is a very long hardwood paddle from the Sepik River of Papua New Guinea featuring immensely complex hand-carved scroll work and carved out of a single piece of solid timber. However, the shaft itself is clearly slightly off straight. Even in cases like this, where the inertial force of an entire boat and its contents would be presumably transferred through the paddle when navigating or stopping by poling off the river bed, extremely experienced and ancient traditional woodworking cultures would still clearly accept inconsistencies. One assumes that picking the right wood (knowing which tree to fell) and how to prepare, treat or store the timber was probably of greater functional utility to producing a useful and lasting tool than absolute geometrical accuracy.
Thus perhaps our current industrial obsession with precision machining is just largely irrelevant to a pre-metal age in which maximum forces were order of magnitudes lower.
possibly, but very early lathes are at least new kingdom and probably old kingdom egypt, so if so it took over 3000 years for that spark to blaze. grinding is much older than that, 44000 years old in australia
precision grinding was crucial to making the pyramids, though those aren't pre-metal. it's also useful for keeping mice out of your stored grain. generally, imprecise construction is liable to collapse on people and kill them, so you'd expect to find precision measurement as soon as you find cities (neolithic), but that is more speculative
the paddle's curvature may be intentional; it reduces impact loads
Two billion years ago? We wouldn't find traces of their industrial activity in rocks - almost all the rocks are gone. We wouldn't notice evidence of mining activity - those mines have been buried by sedimentation, subduction, or vulcanism. We wouldn't find it in atmospheric gas isotopes - those isotopes have long since decayed.
Now if it were 10 million years ago, it is much more likely that we would know.
There are even petroleum deposits whose source rocks go back a billion years. And most coal was deposited in the Carboniferous (thus the name).
Because they will survive. Are we talking about sharks?